Andrew Peters’ Blog

Quite a few people have asked me how to use NHaml outside of ASP.NET MVC. Here’s how to do it:

1) Create your project and add a reference to MvcContrib.NHamlViewEngine
2) Use code like the following to compile and render a template.

var templateCompiler = new TemplateCompiler();
var viewType = templateCompiler.Compile("MyTemplate.haml");		
var view = (ICompiledView)Activator.CreateInstance(viewType);
 
string output = view.Render();

In this case the haml template is located in the same folder as the application.

As always, a good way to figure this stuff out is to take a look at the unit tests. In this case I copied the code verbatim from the NHaml TestFixtureBase class.

Today we were proud to announce the release of WPF Elements, a collection of foundational WPF components, missing from the built-in controls that ship with WPF, but no less essential in the toolbox of any self-respecting WPF developer.

The controls, crafted with care by our resident WPF guru and C# MVP, include:

• WPF Multicolumn TreeView control (aka WPF TreeListView)
• WPF Currency Text box (supports cultures too, passes the Turkey test)
• WPF Integer Text box
• WPF Numeric Text box
• WPF Masked Text box
• WPF DateTimePicker
• WPF DropDownDatePicker
• WPF MonthCalendar
• WPF Spin control (aka up-down control)
• WPF SpinDecorator
• WPF DropDownEditBox
• WPF ProportionalStackPanel

So download the trial and enjoy.

We’re getting close to releasing version 2.0 of our LightSpeed O/RM and so are kicking off a beta program so people can kick the tires.

The key feature of LightSpeed 2 is obviously support for LINQ querying. For 2.0 we’re concentrating on complete feature parity in terms of query expressiveness with LightSpeed 1.0. Our vision for LightSpeed is unchanged: The simplest, fastest and most lightweight O/RM for .NET - The right balance of power vs. complexity.

It’s not only the LINQ support in version 2 either. We’re going to release the first iteration of our code generation toolset. The first version will include a template based tool (both command line and GUI) that generates LightSpeed model classes from an existing database schema. Long term we’re looking at moving the tooling into Visual Studio and supporting bidirectional generation. Of course, we’re always keen to hear what people are after in this area.

If your interested in participating in the beta please go ahead and sign up

After recently finishing a large WPF project, we at Mindscape realized there was a shortage of high quality, great value native WPF controls. So we set about creating some. With that in mind, we released our first one this week: a pure WPF PropertyGrid. Anyone doing WPF development should check it out. It was built with the same philosophy as LightSpeed. In fact, the philosophy we apply to all our products: Simplicity, elegance and performance.

The PropertyGrid in Windows.Forms mode

The PropertyGrid dressed up a bit. Don’t you love WPF!

We plan to release further controls in the coming months so stay tuned.

Thanks to everyone for your overwhelming interest in NHaml so far! I’m happy to announce that the project has now been incorporated into the awesome MVC Contrib project and I will continue to help maintain it from there. Please direct any feature requests/bugs or, better yet, patches there :-)